Timeliness: Your Work in Progress (WIP) Schedule is Incorrectly Forecasting your Cash Flow

A Work In Progress (WIP) report consists of an accounting schedule that’s a portion of a company’s entire balance sheet. In best practices, each accounting period has a calculated work in progress report that complies with GAAP principles.  These reports are required on projects where the Percentage of Completion (POC) accounting method is used. The WIP report typically consists of current period and project-to-date financial metrics that explain each contract the company is working on, however, the format does change from company to company.

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How to Know If You Have Hired the Right Staff Accountant

Staff Accountants are the backbone of any good accounting firm and handle the majority of basic accounting functions for your company. When you have great Staff Accountants, your business will run more smoothly, and your CFO will be able to make the best possible decisions. When it comes to accounting, every small decision matters in a big way for the company as a whole. Here are a few qualities to look out for when hiring Staff Accountants:

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Oversight and Accountability- Have You Left Gaps in Your Controls?

Small businesses are among the most vulnerable groups to fraudulent activity. These businesses are more susceptible and face a greater risk of fraud because typically, they have employees working across many different departments as their job description, there is a closer relationship between the staff and owners, there are few oversight procedures in place, their accounting department has less expertise on financial functions, and there is a larger impact on the bottom line of a small fraudulent event. 

How can you prevent fraud in your small business? Here are a few tips to help you keep your company safe:

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How to Prepare for a Supply Chain Disruption in the Future

As the effects of COVID-19 continue to unfold, many companies have found themselves in a situation for which they were unprepared. Without implementing proper crisis preparation tactics, companies will continue to suffer, as businesses deal with future unexpected occurrences. Being prepared for a potential supply chain disruption, allows companies to work proactively rather than having to react without time to adequately consider their options.

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Planning for Exit?

No matter how emotionally attached you feel to your business, it is essential to start considering an exit strategy as soon as you open your doors. An effective exit strategy will allow your company to take advantage of timely opportunities, such as an acquisition, an IPO, or a lucrative partnership. Planning for future changes by using these types of strategies will also give you the flexibility to set aggressive goals and pivot accordingly as you reach them.

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SEC Relief for Small Businesses

On May 4, 2020, the SEC announced temporary conditional relief for small businesses that have offered Regulation Crowdfunding offerings in the past to allow them to raise additional funding through Regulation Crowdfunding investment offerings under more expedited and less strict criteria.

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Restaurant and Bar Resources During COVID-19

Small businesses are doing everything they can to overcome the economic hurdles created by the COVID-19 outbreak. It is clear that every business will be impacted in some way, but restaurants and bars have been hit especially hard—and suddenly— by the pandemic. 

While chains like Denny’s and IHOP have the cash reserves in place to pay workers—even during the shutdown—small, non-chain restaurants across the country were left feeling abandoned and desperate when faced with mandated closures. In response to the crisis, a slew of programs, grants, and resources have begun to take shape, along with a regularly updated Hospitality Industry Alliance COVID-19 Facebook group. Here are a few of the solutions we think will be most helpful for owners of restaurants, bars, and other small businesses:

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Stacey McKibbin and Matt Garrett Discuss Risk Management in the Face of Coronavirus

With the new normal becoming a reality for everyone, how can we prepare our businesses to survive and thrive during this unprecedented time? TGG Founder & CEO, Matt Garrett, and Stacey McKibbin, CEO of Consilio Consulting discuss the importance of the numbers in your business, and how to better understand how to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic on top.

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How to Tell If You’re Eligible for the Main Street Lending Program

In response to the economic impact of coronavirus, Congress rolled out the Main Street Loan Program to help businesses get funding to stay afloat. This program provides $600 billion in financing for all businesses. Before you consider applying for this loan program, there are a few things to consider.

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Financial Transparency for Complex Organizations

As a developer or private equity firm, it is important to streamline your accounting and forecasting processes—particularly when there is complexity involved—in order to ensure the greatest amount of transparency across your company’s financials. This becomes more complicated (and important) when you have multiple LLCs, a complicated ownership structure, and poor communication with investors. Here are a few ways to ensure clarity in the face of complexity:

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The Benefits of Outsourcing Finance & Accounting

A skilled finance team provides strategic direction, sophisticated insights into the company’s financial situation, financial forecasting, growth planning, and tight control over budgets and cash flow. 

However, interviewing, hiring, training, and paying full-time salaries for each of these employees can be expensive and time-consuming. Many small businesses just don’t have the resources to assemble a full-time finance team. Outsourcing can help!

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Paycheck Protection Program Challenges

The Paycheck Protection Program has been created to assist small businesses during this unprecedented time. The SBA PPP program is only a part of the CARES Federal Stimulus package, which works to counteract the economic downturn related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Recently, the SBA PPP has run into several challenges while dealing with the delivery of funding.

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Changes to the Main Street Loan Program

Over the last week, the Federal Reserve has updated the Main Street Lending Program. There are 5 major changes that the Federal Reserve has made to the Main Street Lending Program that banks will start lending on within the next two weeks. 

If you are eligible you should highly consider taking out one of these loans. It is inexpensive money, and will likely go as quickly as the SBA PPP Loan funds. Get started organizing your information with our MSELF Loan Organizer so you are prepared and at the front of the line to get your money.

Here are the 5 major alterations to the MSELF loan program requirements:

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MSELF Loan: Helping Businesses Navigate COVID-19

The government has implemented yet another  business stimulus loan program called the Main Street Extended Loan Facility (MSELF). This loan program provides up to $2.3 trillion in loans to larger businesses in need. All US banks are eligible to originate this loan. Before you decide to apply, there are a few criteria and features that you should know.

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The Accounting Dream Team: Roles and Responsibilities

As most business owners know, the team behind your bookkeeping is vital to the success of your business. Still, things can get a little complicated when it comes to understanding the roles and responsibilities of each person. In the interest of clarity, we at TGG are always interested in the numbers and transparency, let’s outline each of their roles and responsibilities.  

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Cybersecurity Protocols

With the changing technological times, almost every company is utilizing technology to run their businesses. This can put a company in a vulnerable position if they do not have the right cybersecurity protocols in place. Small businesses tend to be the first target for hackers, as they assume that smaller businesses don’t take the time to protect their company from cybersecurity threats.

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How Boards Can Prepare for Industry Innovation & Disruption

Adopting new technology can be daunting, but innovation is critical to business survival in the age of digital disruption. A recent survey by Ernst & Young revealed insights to help boards of directors improve their companies’ approaches to adopting emerging technologies. Here, we’ve broken down the key takeaways for boards looking to expand and improve their company’s focus on innovation.

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April Client Spotlight-National Cardiac Inc. (NCI)

The team at TGG has been working with National Cardiac for over 2.5 years and in that time, they have had some exciting breakthroughs that will change the way cardiac health is administered across the country. We recently interviewed the CEO of the company, Steve Kenney, about their current innovations and plans for the future. Here are some excerpts from that interview:

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Will AB-5 Be Overturned in the Face of Coronavirus?

As we look into the second quarter of 2020, the question that remains on many business owner’s minds is: will the rules outlined in AB-5 stand in the face of coronavirus?  Concerns around the new criteria for worker classification outlined in Assembly Bill 5 were common at the start of the year, and many business owners chose to reclassify large portions of their workforce as W-2 wage earners rather than their previous classification of a 1099 independent contractor.

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Managing Cash Flow: The pros and cons of alternative financing

Small and medium-sized businesses have historically had challenging relationships with traditional lenders.  When these business owners are in need of more cash flow, they are the least likely to be approved. 

If you’re a new business owner you’re going to find it difficult to obtain a traditional loan from a bank. In most cases, any of the following could prevent you from getting a loan:

You’ve been in business for less than two years
You have a credit score below 640
You want to borrow less than 250,000

The good news is that technology in the financial sector is revolutionizing the way lending is done and big banks are no longer the only option for SMB loans.  Alternative financing in the U.S has tripled in size from 2014 ($11 billion) to 2016 ($34 billion)*:

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Accounting and finance tactics to survive and thrive

This is an article of accounting and finance tactics on how to survive and thrive that our CEO, Matt Garrett shared in a webinar presentation with Vistage.  You can view the recorded version of the webinar and the article here as well as on the Vistage website.

When Matt Garrett, CEO and Founder of TGG Accounting, started thinking about how he would lead his team through the COVID-19 crisis, he thought of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton whose story of survival was chronicled in the book “Endurance.”

“What got this team to survive in brutal conditions was process, routine and sense of purpose,” says Garrett. He has adopted a similar strategy, which is this is just one of the insights he shared for surviving and thriving in a recent webinar for Vistage. Here are the seven tactics for thriving that he outlined to help small and midsize businesses power through today’s health and economic crisis.

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Checklist for Evaluating your CPA Relationship [infographic]

As businesses grow and change, it is necessary to re-evaluate your relationship with your Certified Public Accountant (CPA) from time-to-time and assess whether that CPA is the right match for your business. 

If your business has grown significantly since you hired your CPA, now might be a good time to look at that relationship. Here are questions to ask yourself and your CPA to better judge whether you are well-served and tips on how to find the right CPA if you discover that it is time for a change.

Research.

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Business Liquidity and COVID-19

Liquidity is vital to riding our crises and times of financial uncertainty.
Business liquidity during times of instability is vital to longevity and ultimately, to survival. Having liquidity allows a business to continue to meet payroll and fulfill operating costs and expenses.

Here are a few ways to look for liquidity during this time of uncertainty:

Reduce Overhead Costs

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Companies like Cisco have a “Pandemic Response Plan” — Do you?

In a world that is changing more quickly than ever, businesses need a plan when things go sideways. Companies like Cisco have taken the principle of “planning ahead” seriously, ensuring that they don’t have to be worried about the effects of the Coronavirus outbreak, they can calmly implement their Pandemic Response Plan. According to the document published to their website, Cisco has “well-established processes to coordinate our efforts during outbreaks like COVID-19, including our Global Business Resiliency (GBR) and Supply Chain Incident Management (SCIM) Processes.”
Business Resiliency programs centered on surviving unprecedented crises, like the coronavirus outbreak are the exception, not the rule, especially in smaller companies. Annual reviews and “fire drills” ensure that operations do not become so reliant on existing supply chains and processes that they cannot pivot in case of a crisis. For critical business operations, larger companies conduct audits and annual exercises to make sure their resiliency plan works to mitigate disruptions.

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TGG: Important Updates to the SBA Paycheck Protection Loan Program as of April 3, 2020

The SBA Paycheck Protection Loan Program has changed as of today, Friday, April 3, 2020.

Matt Garrett reviews the eligibility requirements, loan terms and fund allocations required for businesses who receive these PPP loans.

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Exit Planning and Growth – What should you focus on?

You’re thinking of selling your business…now what? It can be an overwhelming process to know where to start and what buyers are going to be focusing on. Here are some pointers on where to start as you target a future exit; which revolves around planning ahead and running a financially conservative business.

Quality of Earnings Report

Historically, companies planning for an exit strategy would focus on three years of audited financial statements as the standard reporting expected by a buyer. Today, a Quality of Earnings Report is much more desirable. For either of these to be effective (or even possible) however, you need to have accurate books. With those in place your CPA can come in and give you a Quality of Earnings Report to prove beyond a doubt to a potential buyer that the financial information you are providing is correct.

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Practical Ways to Structure Remote Teams in the Face of Coronavirus

Man working on laptop

As soon as the statistics, predictions and hypotheses related to the economic fallout from the Coronavirus outbreak are put in print, they change. That stated, as of March 18, 2020, we, the team at TGG, want to share what we can with our network to help you structure remote teams in the face of great change.

It has been a little more than 10 weeks since the Coronavirus outbreak began to be reported globally. In the past 3 days, the U.S. has moved from banning gatherings of 500 or more to 50 or more and now 10 or more. Over the past three days, a ban on all gatherings of 50 or more individuals has expanded to a ban on all gatherings of 10 or more people at any time. Drive-through tests are being set up around the U.S. with the ability to swab sick individuals and provide results more rapidly than the current 3-day wait. Though at this time there are few stations to be found.

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Boom or Bust Part IV: 3 Ways to Assess Your Customer Base & Measure Performance

In the fourth and final part of our Boom or Bust series, we are focusing on assessing your sales metrics and customer base to measure performance. The tactics we’ve outlined below are designed to help you mitigate risk, grow your business and diversify your customer base.

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7 smart financial strategies for surviving an economic crisis

Financial Tips for Disaster Preparedness

This is an article of financial strategies our CEO, Matt Garrett shared with Vistage.  You can view the original article on the Vistage Website.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to worsen, finance experts say the global economy is spiraling towards a recession at best. Some also warn that a depression may be right around the corner with unemployment levels we have not seen for 90 years.

“This is 100% unprecedented,” says Matt Garrett, CEO of TGG Accounting, who has spoken to more than 600 Vistage groups about finance best practices for small and midsize firms. “We’re going to lose years and years of productivity. It’s going to present a massive unemployment problem…and a massive problem for the business community at large.”

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Boom or Bust Part III: 4 Ways to Retain Key Talent in a Competitive Market

In the third part of our 4-part series, we are focusing on how to retain your employees since they provide real value to your business every day. The ideas we’ve outlined below are intended to help you find ways to keep your employees fulfilled in their current positions in a tight job market.

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